Okay I lied....

In my previous post I said I will write everyday but I didn't. I am just going to paste what I wrote on Facebook.

My dear Tun, when you first mooted Vision 2020, the world was excited, in fact the President from my University then, way back in 1989, quoted your Vision 2020. To be a developed nation by 2020. Now is 2018, 29 years have passed since then and the year 2020 is just around the corner. It will take much longer than just less than 2 years to come up with a new strategy for yet another national car project. Whatever we come up with will not create a dent to bump us up before 2020.

We have Industry 4.0 knocking our doors. The days of individual ownership may soon be a thing of the past with autonomous cars making headway. Driverless cars are already on the roads. Cars running using fossil fuel may soon be history as different energy are considered.

People are getting sick of pollution and smog. Many are excited with not driving. Riding bicycles and commuting on efficient public system. So when we are looking towards cancelling ECRL, HSR, MRT 3 and LRT 3 and instead continuing the archaic idea of yet another national car, it disappointed the majority of us.

We want to see trails for train services including trams plying our streets. We want to see lesser cars and lesser congestion. We want to move from one place to another in comfort and in minutes, not hours.

Please don't force us with another car. Instead look towards expanding our rail expertise, expanding it throughout the nation. Get Sabah and Sarawak too to enjoy it. And who know one day we may even have our own underground tunnel for rail similar to the Channel Tunnel.

And

My take on UEC? It does not make sense to have 2 different qualifications that seemingly favours one particular race.To me it does not matter whether it is MCA or DAP or Gerakan that pushes for it, to me it just does not make sense.

These days there are already parents that chooses to do O Levels, IB and so forth, which already undermines our SPM. With this UEC it further undermines our SPM and our school system. Matter of time before every school start to do their own thing and then how do we then control quality?

The education system seems already lost with the mushrooming of these private schools and all these tahfiz centres. With the UEC coming into play might as well just shut down the Ministry of Education because they have not been playing their role governing all these.

Fairly soon, which is already happening, our children will be educated in different streams, different systems, some of them barely intersecting with one another. And with different certification there will segments in society that will have nothing in common.

When was the last time I wrote?

It has been a long time since I last wrote here. I need to be more disciplined and prolific in my writing. I didn't realise this. The last I wrote here was in 2014!

This is terrible, I vow and declare today and now that I will write in here everyday. So here I am writing again. Why am I writing? Because that's what makes me feel better. There are times when I write in newspapers, or even Facebook.

I need a change of scene. I have been in my current job for over 2 and a half years now and I just feel it is time to move on. I am approaching 50 this year, in fact in just over a month. I have a lot to offer and a lot to give however there are very few options open for new employment once people reach this age. For one, some employers feel that we are at the end of our useful life and for others they feel that executives at our age is a little too expensive for them. Not just because of salary but also benefits especially with medical insurance, their premium will be higher because over 40s have entered the high risk zone.

When I last wrote, I was still in a Multi National Company. I was there for over 7 years. It's a lovely place to work, but they were facing difficult market conditions so the best thing to do was to leave. It helped them because they can hire someone cheaper and it helps me to explore other roles for me to play. I am still very much in touch with the CEO, my ex colleagues and even the former Chairman. I still deeply regret having to leave the place but there's very little that I can do.

What's the scene change I seek? I'd like to be a free agent, a free lancer but of course with something that pays because I still have bills to pay and a family to feed in addition to growing children. I can't recall what I wrote previously, anyway I have 2 lovely children, a boy and a girl. The boy is now a young man at 13 while the girl is approaching 10, growing to be a lovely young lady. While the boy is doing well in school with very little effort, the girl is struggling. She have a short attention span and previously had difficulty reading because she was diagnosed with dyslexia.

But the school is amazing. My wife's patience with her is amazing. So from not knowing to read, write and do maths, she is an avid reader now, not needing to read even the specially written books. She can write now and can even do her homework on her own. She have yet to get a grasp of the mathematics principle. So I am doing my best to make it interesting for her.

Without understanding multiplications, it will be tough for her to do fractions and more. That will be our challenge. However, I thank God that she is not autistic, like what some of my friends are facing, contending with children with autism but I still need to have the patience to manage her short attention span.

I will continue again tomorrow.